In January of 1984, Apple's most famous television ad promised to smash Big Brother. Twenty-eight years later, a strange new patent seems to show that the company has finally gotten back to its roots.

On Tuesday Apple received a patent for what it describes as a system that clones Internet users, gives them multiple digital identities, and uses phony attributes of those clones to "pollute" tracking systems with false leads that protect the real user's privacy from "Big Brother"--or what the author of the patent describes as the "Little Brothers" of automated network surveillance.

In the convoluted language of patents, Apple describes a "principal"--a user--whose real activities are mixed up with those of a collection of clones generated to perform other, confusing actions and hide the real user from surveillance. "A cloned identity is created for a principal," reads the patent, which was first spotted by Patently Apple. "Areas of interest are assigned to the cloned identity, where a number of the areas of interest are divergent from true interests of the principal. One or more actions are automatically processed in response to the assigned areas of interest. The actions appear to network eavesdroppers to be associated with the principal and not with the cloned identity."

The clever idea presented is that users not try to hide their private information, interests and actions from Google, Facebook or the NSA. Instead, they simply flood the network with false data connected to convincing alter egos until the eavesdropper can't tell the difference.

"The more the cloning agent appears to be a legitimate and an autonomous entity over the network that acts in a consistent manner, the more difficult it will be for eavesdroppers to detect the subterfuge. Therefore, the cloning agent is designed to exhibit characteristics in manners expected by users or human network resources," reads the patent. "Data collection is not prevented; rather, it is encouraged for the cloned identity and intentionally populated with divergent information that pollutes legitimate information gathered about the principal."

There's no guarantee that Apple will develop any real product that implements the idea. But even the language in the patent itself reads like a privacy manifesto--not the usual corporate Apple-speak.

Users are growing uncomfortable with the amount of information marketers possess today about them and many feel it is an invasion of their privacy even if the marketing is currently considered to be lawful. Moreover, even legitimate and lawful enterprises that collect confidential information about a user runs the risk of having an intruder penetrate their databases and acquiring the information for subsequent unlawful purposes.

Concerns about the government and its knowledge about its citizenry is often referred to in a derogatory sense as actions of "Big Brother" who is omnipresent and gathering information to use to its advantage when needed. The electronic age has given rise to what is now known as thousands of "Little Brothers," who perform Internet surveillance by collecting information to form electronic profiles about a user not through human eyes or through the lens of a camera but through data collection.

Ideology aside, the techniques that Apple's describing aren't strictly new. Anonymizing tools like the browser plug-in Abine already allow users to switch between created identities to throw off tracking, says Ashkan Soltani, a privacy researcher who worked with the Wall Street Journal on its "What They Know" series on advertising and surveillance. But it may be a sign that Apple has taken notice of privacy as an opportunity--potentially a weapon it can use in its competition with Google and other advertising-focused firms.

"Other companies have historically let you selectively reveal different sets of cookies, different authentication tokens, or even dynamically generate burner email addresses, with a different type of identity associated with each of them," says Soltani. "It's not totally novel stuff. But it’s interesting to see that Apple might be doing something around this."